jQuery Mobile 1.1 has been released with changes to make it faster and smoother.

According to the blog post about the new version, the most notable improvements in 1.1.0 are true fixed toolbars, completely re-vamped animated page transitions and AJAX loader, refined form element design and feature set, and improved documentation.

The task of changing themes from 1.0 to 1.1 has also been addressed with the development of a utility that makes it easy to take a 1.0 theme and migrate it for use in 1.1.

The support for true fixed toolbars gets around the problems you may have encountered if you tried the previous version. JQuery Mobile 1.0 got around the lack of support for fixed toolbars in mobile platforms by dynamically repositioning the toolbars when you scrolled, but the way this was handled by mobile browsers wasn’t perfect. This new version provides CSS-based fixed toolbars on many mobile platforms including iOS5; Android 2.2, 2.3, 3.x tablets and 4.x; BB Playbook and 7, Nook Color/Tablet, Kindle Fire and 3, and all modern desktop browsers.

In the blog post, Todd Parker says that the AJAX navigation system is one of the best things about jQuery Mobile because it makes page navigation faster and adds animated page transitions, but admits that scrolling pages between transitions and Android’s poor animation performance both caused problems. The new version fudges the transition scrolling issue by fading out the current page and scrolling in the background before showing the new page. However, as Todd Parker says:

“I won’t mince words here: Android as a whole has abysmal performance rendering CSS keyframe animations. Regardless of version or device, Android devices stutter, drop frames and blink when performing any page page animation other than a simple fade.”

So now you know why we need more efficient implementations of HTML/CSS and perhaps more powerful processors.

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